August Harvest

Cleaning Up the Small Garden

Both the big garden in the back of the yard, and this small garden are all out of sorts. I have taken on a couple of extra consulting jobs to save a little extra money before school starts, and the garden got the short end of the stick.

This morning I started working on catching up. Here’s the small garden as of this morning. The grass in the front-right is where Sophie threw a handfull of grass seed into the carrot plot.  The bare spot front-left is where the onions were supposed to be growing.

Small garden before

We have been eating carrots for the last two weeks and they don’t seem to be growing any more, so I decided to pick them all, clean out the weeds, and plant a new crop of spinach.

Here’s the carrots, we also found a few tiny onions that were struggling to live.

Bowl full of carrots

Small bowl of small onions

Our initial crop of spinach went to seed really quickly, probably because of how hot it was earlier in the summer. We only got a couple of small salads out of it. I cut some of the dried seed stalks and put them in the basement near the dehumidifier where it would be relatively cool and relatively dry.

Today when I went to use them they were nice and crispy. It was and simple task to rub them off the stalks into a bowl.

Dried Spinach Seeds

I rubbed them off into a bowl, winnowed them a little bit so that it was mostly seeds, then planted them. I also planted a new crop of lettuce and swiss chard (someone gave me the seeds) along the path to the spigot.

Spinach seeds ready to be winnowed

The little garden looks pretty respectable again.

Small garden all cleaned up

Other Harvests

Despite the lack of attention, the garden has been doing pretty well. We have been eating as many beets as our kids can stand — about once a week. Here’s the final harvest. There’s no more in the big garden now.

The final beets

We have had a couple small bowls of green beans (and purple beans), but today was the first big harvest.

First big bowl of green beans

We have been picking the cherry tomatoes every 3 or 4 days for the last two weeks and end up with a bowl about this full each time.

Cherry tomatoes

The two big sunflower in our garden were volunteers, and they were doing great at first — they grew to about 8 feet tall. The minute the seeds got ripe enough for birds to eat, the birds attacked them, and now they look like this.

The birds ate all the sunflower seeds

I’ve still got a little bit of extra contract work to finish up next week, so I won’t even pretend that I’ll have lots of garden news. After those two gigs are done, I should have a short reprieve before school starts in September.

Happy gardening!